Which hosting plan uses fastly?

If you check Reliable and lighting-fast website hosting service | Webflow says webflow host companies like ideo.com, seamlessdocs.com or hellosign.com at fastly & amazon.

But if you test where they are hosted only ideo.com seems to be at fastly (proof Best Web Hosting Providers of 2022 - Digital.com) the other ones says are hosted at amazon.

That seems to correlate with the TTFB speed, if you check all 3 in pingdom (you can test from any location) you will see that ideo.com always have a much much better TTFB, why is that? Maybe its cause the “Global CDN” feature in the business plan?

On the other hand the subdomains.webflow.io where we preview our projects have the same behaviour than ideo.com, hosted at fastly and super low TTFB, they are amazing.

Wich hosting plan I have to pay to have this exact level of performance with a custom domain?

Thank you!

Hey JSM

Sorry for the confusion, there are a couple things going on here and I will do my best to clear them up!

The ideo.com website itself is not hosted by Webflow. (However they do use Webflow for many other of their sites, such as https://www.circulardesignguide.com/ or https://antibotics.ideo.com/)

As for the other sites, whether or not they use Fastly depends on whether or not they are using SSL. Fastly does not (currently?) have support for automatically provisioning SSL certificates for a domain, so we were not able to use them for our SSL hosting infrastructure. Instead we have built our own infrastructure for handling SSL connections on top of AWS. This currently is limited to a single region (Virginia) but we are actively working on support for multi-region SSL hosting and should have updates on that very soon.

For sites which do not have SSL enabled, those are using Fastly. The distinction mostly occurs at the DNS layer, so if you point your domain to proxy.webflow.com it will use Fastly. If it is pointed to proxy-ssl.webflow.com it will use our own infrastructure to handle the SSL termination.

Let me know if that didn’t clear things up or if you have other questions!

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Thank you @nathan

Hmm let me see if I understand that.

I must choose between:

  1. No SSL+ fastly
  2. SSL + amazon from virginia

This is correct?

Since I’m from Europe amazon from virginia will have half a second TTFB…

Wish I could have both, great TTFB and SSL. Maybe exporting and hosting by my side? I’ve seen fastly charge 100$ a month for SSL, But then I lose the CMS.

You have any idea for a solution? Or at least ETA for europe SSL hosting? It wouldnt be that fast as fastly but its pretty decent!

Edit: @nathan another question, SSL how interacts with GLOBAL CDN in the business plan? Still only from Virginia?

Thank you very much.

Or at least ETA for europe SSL hosting?

I can’t make any guarantees, but we are looking at rolling out the next region (in Europe) within the next 2-3 months.

SSL how interacts with GLOBAL CDN in the business plan?

For a given site, there are two sources of content. There is the HTML pages that are loaded directly from the domain (and served either via Fastly or our SSL infra) and then there are the external assets. Images, JS, CSS, etc. The external assets are served from Cloudfront. The global CDN refers to where the external assets are served from, and regardless of SSL setup, those will always be served from AWS CloudFront’s global network (very similar to Fastly in terms of TTFB)

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I’d like to ask for an update on this since we’re trying to recommend Webflow to a client right now.

Has anything happened on the Europe hosting front?

Would be great for a client to be able to choose a region where the site’s hosted.

Good news! Our SSL hosting now has servers in Europe (Ireland). Once you point your domain to proxy-ssl.webflow.com, it will work out of the box with no additional configuration needed. Customers will automatically be routed to the closest data center.

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Thank you, Nathan. To clarify, when you say “Customers will automatically be routed to the closest data center”, do you mean that site visitors will get served the website from the data centre closest to them? Or does this mean that the site will be hosted on a data centre closest to the location of the site owner?

I’m particularly interested since Webflow processes and saves form data, and probably other visitor data that use WFs ecommerce functionality. Is there a guarantee that personal data like this is being processed and hosted in the EU only? That’s what site owners are sometimes concerned about – although since you are GDPR compliant, it should not really be an issue, right?

Thank you for your answers.

To clarify, when you say “Customers will automatically be routed to the closest data center”, do you mean that site visitors will get served the website from the data centre closest to them? Or does this mean that the site will be hosted on a data centre closest to the location of the site owner?

Visitors will get served the website from the data centre closest to them. A visitor in the USA will have the traffic served from either Virginia or Oregon. A visitor in Europe will have the traffic served from Ireland.

Is there a guarantee that personal data like this is being processed and hosted in the EU only?

All data is currently stored in Virgina. A copy of the published site is served from Ireland to make page loads faster.

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How about now (2 years later)? I’ve been thinking to move my site to webflow for a while, looks like so much more fun, but I’d rather avoid aws as much as possible…

Or is there no way to avoid aws?

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Also wondering this, any updates?